Homily for Nan Smith’s Funeral
Thursday March 11, 2010
I’d like to start by welcoming everyone here, especially Nan’s friends and family – her husband Tom, her daughters Dori and Carolyn and their families. It would mean a lot to Nan to see you all here in this church she loved so much.
Nan attended St. Nick’s for last few years of her life, and she always sat in that same section way in the back so she could be near the organ. In fact, earlier this week I told her daughters that, even after we had a small baby boom here and Nan’s corner became the crying corner, she stayed right there in her spot. In this, she was a very good Episcopalian: not only did she sit in the back of the church, but she also refused to give up her seat!
But seriously, Nan was one of those parishioners who ministered as much to us as we did to her, and I especially felt like that as her priest. She attended Bible studies here, frequently sharing insights on the text that really made me think. She always made a special effort to ask how I was doing, particularly during busy seasons. Sometimes she would offer helpful feedback on sermons (always a preacher’s daughter, she!).
But most meaningful of all, she had a habit of stopping by on Thursday afternoons, sometimes to read me letters she had written or received, and sometimes to read me her poems, just the two of us (in fact we’d sit right up here: Nan in the priest’s chair and me right here in this pew).
It was during one of those Thursday meetings that she also told me she had made her funeral arrangements more than a decade ago. I remembered that just after she died, and was grateful that she had already done a lot of the work for today by planning this out. When I looked back over those requests early this week, though, I was surprised that she left one thing out (and the least likely part of the service you’d expect her to leave out): the Gospel reading.
For those of you not familiar with the tradition, the Book of Common Prayer, from which this service is taken, gives you a choice of five Gospel readings. The Gospel reading is sort of the summation of all the other readings - definitely not the one you would expect Nan to forget.
I could only figure that she wanted the priest to choose it, because the priest always reads the Gospel during the service. But somehow I also got in my head that Nan might have been challenging me to pick the reading that best captures how she lived out her faith.
So, with this in mind, I went through each of the readings, trying to find just the right one for Nan.
The first of the five choices that I read was the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead – what some consider the climax of Luke’s Gospel, and a harbinger of Jesus’ own resurrection. It’s a great funeral passage, but somehow I could just hear Nan saying: “Astrid, that’s too obvious.”
So I went on to the next passage, the story of Lazarus’ sisters, Mary and Martha. In that passage, Mary and Martha are grieving the loss of their brother before he’s raised from the dead. Again, another wonderful reading (Nan would probably agree), but to this one, I could almost hear her saying, ”Nice, but too sentimental.”
So, I went on to the next reading, probably the best known of the five choices. In that reading, Jesus is consoling his disciples in preparation for his death, and he assures them that “In my father’s house there are many mansions … and I go to prepare a place for you.” I know this whole exercise of putting words in Nan’s mouth is a bit presumptuous, but somehow, I felt like Nan might say to this one, “Astrid, that’s a little too cliché.”
So I went on to the next the passage from John – the one I read just a moment ago - and somehow I knew right away that it was the passage for Nan.
Fittingly, John’s Gospel is the most poetic of the four Gospels, dealing in abstractions, puns, double meanings, and so on. This particular passage takes place just after Jesus has fed five thousand people with two fish and five loaves of bread – one of the most famous stories in the Gospels. And so he starts to talk to them about the spiritual food that nourishes the soul.
It’s a complex passage – I’m sure Nan would have liked it for that reason - but the line here that really stood out to me was that one where Jesus says:
“And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day.”
As all of you know, as a poet, Nan was an assiduous gatherer of words and thoughts, an observer of subtle shifts, and of life’s contradictions and quirks.
Last week, Tom let me borrow the poetry notebook that Nan brought with her to our Thursday meetings. I was familiar with a lot of its contents, but had no idea until I leafed through those pages just how carefully she took stock of everything. A tiny twig could be described in umpteen different ways; she’d spend weeks just getting one single word right.
“She lost nothing of all that God had given her … but raised it up.”
The 20th Century poet Auden once said that you can’t be a Christian without being a poet, and maybe he meant that you have to take every last thing that God gives you and, like Nan did, savor it, turn it over, and make of it something meaningful to the world.
So, as we remember Nan today and in the days and years ahead, let us live by her example, holding fast and raising up all that God has given us. Amen.
